Financial Services Apps in India: How to Improve the User Experience

Smartphone applications that are thoughtfully and effectively designed can have a substantial positive impact on customer adoption, usage, and satisfaction. Poor design can confuse, confound, and sometimes mislead. This, in turn, can make customers feel anxious, frustrated, misunderstood, and suspicious; ultimately, it can lead customers to abandon a service. This report uses an expert review of six smartphone applications available in India to highlight the design elements that are needed to create a design solution that is clear, simple, and ultimately useful and usable.

With these insights, design teams can think afresh about the design of the smartphone applications they are delivering, and bring new ideas to their customers to obtain real-world feedback. This report should be used as a practical guide for people who create smartphone applications for customers of mobile financial services in India and beyond. Most of the applications reviewed in this report have many basic usability problems. The bulk of this report is dedicated to explaining these issues. Individually, each of these small problems may not have a significant impact. But collectively, these poor design decisions form a continuous series of barriers that can confuse users and undermine their confidence.